Gnus (newsreader) licensing

[Ayappan P2]

Hi ,

We are porting Emacs to IBM AIX operating system. As of part of getting
legal approval for any opensource software, we do code scan.

While doing the code scan of Emacs, we encountered the following patent
statements regarding slave Gnusae.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Slave-Gnusae.html

Does this mean we should not be using this feature freely ?

Thanks
Ayappan P